There was one special occasion, I think … I should think it must
have been probably somewhere about 1950, when the Cunard company
commissioned a painting of the Queen Mother which they hung in the
First Class lounge. It was a very beautiful picture and the
wish of Cunard was that we should match the colour of the Queen's
dress with sweet peas so she must have come down in June I would
think. They put a spy on the railway platform at Winchester
where the train stopped to pick up the...I suppose the Lord
Lieutenant and the other Hampshire VIPs so we had the time that the
train took to come from Winchester through to Southampton docks to
carry out a decoration of 5 huge containers...in fact they were
soup tureens...which we have got flora pack and that sort of thing
in...to go right across the top table. So we were waiting there
with all these boxes of different coloured sweet peas all ready to
go as soon as we got the message. Well, a message came
through, was phoned through to the ship and a runner brought us the
message so we set into this … this job right across the...and just
about got it finished and we had a message that the Queen was
coming up the gangway so anyway we just about got it done and
disappeared into the galley behind. But the problem was that
the dear lady changed her dress in the train between Winchester and
Southampton so we didn't match after all.
Question: After all that, a different colour huh?
(Laughs).
